A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Sermon : ADVICE FROM THE CLERGY : On Living the Values We Teach

I have four children, three young men and a woman, ages 13 to 28. A few weeks ago, I took three of them and my daughter’s boyfriend back to Boston. We embarked on a conscious trip back to my childhood. It was an incredible experience to see my childhood through my children’s eyes, for them to touch and feel the places of my youth both in Brookline and in Maine during the summers.

Just around the corner from where I grew up in Brookline, John F. Kennedy was born, just minutes away from our apartment. When we went to my apartment, I showed my children where I played stickball and shared other fond memories. I then took them to J.F.K.’s birthplace. Then we went to Irving’s, the corner candy store just across the street from my synagogue, my shul-- Irving’s, which opened 53 years ago, the same time that I was born.

And the candy store was still there. This little hole in the wall with all kinds of penny candies and cards and little gifts. It was a phenomenal experience to walk back in and see the widow of Irving, still running the store. We hadn’t seen one another in 35 years, yet she recognized me. We kissed and gave each other a big hug. Then she turned to my children, and I felt big tears running down my cheeks.

I want to explore what was so important about the candy store. You know I am fond of saying that my job as a rabbi is to help you create memories. The corner candy store is the happy memory store. Is it simple nostalgia that makes it so memorable? Is it just the Popsicles, the penny candies I could absolutely taste as I walked through the door?

But Irving’s is fascinating because it was the community setting, the hub, in which we collectively practiced living the values we had learned across the street, in the shul. We hung out there every day, before and after school. Ethel and Irving taught us good shopping manners and how to spend our money wisely.

They were role models, although we didn’t know the term. We absorbed their integrity and decency as we grew up in their little shop, and we never gypped them, though we were tempted, because of the principles of honesty we learned from books and our respect for them.

When I visited Brookline, I learned that the grade school we had attended now has two cash awards given by Irving’s candy store to a boy and a girl selected for showing warmth, love, caring and understanding--for creating good will and good behavior.

Both sides of the street: the shul and the candy store, theory and practice, right there in that humble environment. It struck me how we were taught big lessons in such subtle ways.

I have a suggestion. The next time you are about to ask your child what grade he or she got in history or literature, ask instead what mitzvah they did that day, what deed of loving kindness?